Posted: Thu Sep 06, 2007 7:01 pm Post subject: Resolve and close an incident if it just reports a bug?

Hello,
The question is the following:

I’ve got an email from a customer that report of an issue using the application. (like market estimations after year 2030 are clearly false)
I open an incident ticket.
After a first analysis it appears evident that this is related to an application bug.
I open a problem ticket to deal with the bug. At the same time let’s imagine that there is no workaround for this issue (it may happen): what to do with the incident ticket?

I keep it unresolved and open till the underlying problem is solved (the bug is fixed)?
I resolve the incident as “won’t fix” and I keep it open till the underlying problem is solved (the bug is fixed)?
I close the incident and I take care only of the problem ticket?

The incident record should be linked to the problem record and left open. Any additional reports of users encountering the issue should have new incident records opened and linked to the same problem record. This way, by using the count of incidents linked to problem records, Problem Management can prioritize which problems to address.

Once Problem/Change/Release have implemented and confirmed that the problem has been resolved, then all the linked incidents can be resolved.

If you want to prevent the open incidents from being used as a negative reflection against your metrics, include a status for incidents of "Awaiting Problem Resolution" and exclude that status from your reporting.

Hi dboylan,
Thanks for your answer. I agree with you on keeping the incident records open to give numbers to prioritise problem resolutions. (btw one of the major interest of implementing an itil approach to service support in my company is to have a, outer, measurable point of view on priorities etc. )
So removing the third hypothesis from the list above, it remains:

I keep it unresolved and open till the underlying problem is solved (the bug is fixed)?
I resolve the incident as “won’t fix” and I keep it open till the underlying problem is solved (the bug is fixed)?

I‘d naturally tend to resolve the incident (keeping it open) even if there is no workaround. So second option. I gave a look at the Service Support book V2 5.6.4 and this is not 100% clear to me.

As the only workaround is to keep working and acknowledge that the results are wrong, it usually makes sense to keep the Incident open and linked to the Problem record. You will want to update the Incident record with the details, so that you have a knowledge history of what is going on, so that others can leverage that information, in the future. Also, if you're doing your job of constantly re-evaluating your Incidents, this Incident's Severity and Priority will get higher as you get closer to the year 2030.

NOTE: Many people will take the easy way out and close Incidents that are open longer than a period of time (let's say two years), because they don't want to sift through all the Incidents to see what should or shouldn't be closed. If people in your company do this, such an Incident will be closed because people will assume if it hasn't been addressed in all this time, it's not that important. Wrong assumption...